System management products allow a company to efficiently manage its information technology (IT) infrastructure while controlling its expenses and improving its service level. As examples, the Tivoli® server products available from International Business Machines Corp., of Armonk, N.Y., as well as network and device management products, provide an end-to-end view of an IT infrastructure for resource allocation, monitoring, and provisioning, and also can provide problem prevention and resolution capabilities. Monitoring products manage the health and availability of IT infrastructure in an end-to-end manner, including operating systems, databases, and servers within the infrastructure, across distributed and host environments.
However, such monitoring products do not provide for monitoring the activity of business applications and business application enablers. Application enablers integrate software applications with document and process management process. Hundreds of applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications, customer relationship management (CRM) applications, as well as accounting and other transactional systems, have been “application enabled.” In this respect, they allow users to index and retrieve documents without leaving the applications themselves.
Because application enablers operate as an extension of a familiar interface, the disruption to an employee's routines is minimal. The custom integration provided by an application enabler matches the user's requirements and are flexible enough to change and evolve alongside the business. Business activity monitoring in real time allows activities such as leadership development, engagement, service, and satisfaction to be measured. The information collected from applications and application enablers include various metrics that are known as key performance indicators (KPI's).
However, business activity monitoring is typically not correlated with the monitoring of the availability and performance of IT systems. As such, IT administrators cannot proactively remediate business activity issues when they result from availability and performance problems of their underlying IT systems. Key business performance indicators may deteriorate because of problems with the operating system or hardware of the application servers on which the business applications or application enablers are running. Furthermore, when the application servers that are used to host applications and application enablers are structured in complex clustered topologies using middleware software layers for integration, it is difficult at best to correlate KPI's to relevant operating system and hardware performance data.